Perfect Labor Storm 2.0 is a blog that highlights workforce trends, demographic shifts, and human resources changes that will change the way employers do business.

February 03, 2011

"Great minds think alike" - I don't know how many times I've heard that in my life. In fact, I probably spoke those very words dozens of times. But new research is questioning how effective sameness is as a competitive strategy. One recent study suggests that similar minds might make management easier, but it doesn't breed innovation.

IBM learned that lesson over a decade ago. In the 1980s they had an ad that said "Great minds think alike." IBM changed their ways. They eventually changed the ad to "Great minds think unalike."

Unfortunately many other organizations, and especially the managers within them, still see the same light. They still tend to hire people who think like them. They build teams of people who agree with them too. Individuals who challenge them or the status quo are hushed and encouraged to give up their personal identity for the good of the team. Diversity is rhetorically supported at hiring but in practice it is often just an effort to meet quotas.

An article published in Inc. magazine highlights a recent study, which set out to discover how employee diversity within workgroups affects the group's overall performance. According to Bill Swann, a professor of psychology at University of Texas at Austin where the study was completed, groups with members who "externalized their personal identities" (i.e. students who expressed individuality) were more successful than groups with members who tended to downplay their personalities.

A few experts offered advice how diversity within a company can be used as a strategic advantage to "create better innovation, better products, and ultimately, a better company."

1. Culture. Before an organization will reap the rewards of a diverse work environment, it's essential to have an infrastructure set up that not only supports diversity, but also celebrates it. You just can't offer training and expect change. Diversity must become part of the organization's DNA.

2. Hiring. Creating a successfully diverse work environment that fosters innovation comes down to one thing: hiring the right people. It's important to find out what that person values, and how they, as an individual, can bring a specific skill set to the organization.

3. Diversity. Diversity can be a loaded term, filled with connotation about race and gender, but that's not always the case. Personality, talent, and experience are also important traits to consider when creating a diverse work group. And an increasing challange and opportunity is age or generational diversity. By integrating the experience of Baby Boomers and Generation X with young technology-savvy Millenials, process can be improved and productivity increased with diverse perspective and new skills.

4. Leadership. The major challenge of achieving an effective diverse pool of employees is not filling quotas or hiring a certain amount of people from a specific demographic. The hurdle managers face is creating the environment where people feel comfortable expressing diverse opinions. The catalyst for fostering innovation falls upon the shoulders of managers and CEOs.

June 30, 2010

Without innovative ideas, a company stagnates and may even cease to exist. In other words, innovate or die.

But innovation isn’t just about turning on your right brain, brainstorming, and generating a few “aha” moments. It’s more than just dreaming up new ideas. Innovation is the "act of introducing something new” – with an emphasis on something new.

Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has a little vignette in his book The Innovator's Dilemma about how people were trying to fly in the Middle Ages by fabricating wings, strapping them onto their arms, jumping and flapping real hard. For centuries subsequent innovators framed the problem as: The guys who died just didn't flap hard enough. Yet it still never worked. Once they understood that there were some basic laws of nature that they needed to account for, once Bernoulli understood fluid mechanics well enough to articulate his principle, then there was a law of nature we could actually harness.

A lot of good managers during these challenging times are flapping their wings. They are working very hard to fight some fundamental changes in the way we will do business when they should be harnessing the changes and identifying the opportunities.

What’s standing in their way? Until this century, businesses executed change at a controlled pace.Market strategies were developed years in advance and product roadmaps extended years into the future.Today, unprecedented changes in markets, technology, economies, and consumers' taste is continuous, complex, chaotic, and accelerating.This rapid change has created a new set of challenges - very quickly.

Innovation demands creativity, the ability to develop new ideas.But despite the entire emphasis about being more creative, every new idea isn't innovative. And many life-altering ideas never see the light of day.Why?

Because the only way creative ideas become reality is by taking risks. “The willingness to take risks is not always easy,” according to Jacqueline Byrd, the brain behind Creatrix,“ especially when forced to push an idea against opposition and adversity. Innovation requires a willingness to accept criticism, to withstand frustration, and to make mistakes. In other words, innovation means that a person or organization is willing to push his or her ideas forward at some potential risk to his or her own security, career, reputation, or self-esteem.

Strategically, that’s a fundamental and essential question for every organization and individual. In future posts, I’ll be writing more about how you and/or your organization can assess this innovative capacity, how to determine how much is enough, how to identify the 7 drivers of creativity and risk-taking, and 9 personality traits that shape innovation.